Integrated reanalysis of global riverine fish eDNA datasets

Environmental DNA (eDNA) has revolutionized biodiversity monitoring in aquatic ecosystems. One of its possible hallmarks is the potential global comparability of datasets, yet this opportunity has been largely left unexplored due to diverse sampling protocols and bioinformatic workflows. This dataset compiles and harmonizes riverine fish community data derived from environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding studies conducted worldwide. In total, this dataset comprises 58 riverine fish eDNA metabarcoding datasets from 1,818 sampling sites, comprising both published and novel datasets with the goal of assessing and comparing biodiversity patterns from the individual original studies with a unified analysis under a common bioinformatic pipeline. We thereby demonstrate the power of integrating individual eDNA metabarcoding datasets for biodiversity assessment and monitoring.